In My Veins
by sendmenoflowers
Summary: When Bellatrix graduated from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, she expected to go back to her safe and dull bubble. And then along came Tom.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1.

Rodolphus once asked me what I was like as a teenager. He said he was curious about my past. After all, he hadn't met me until I was twenty-four and by then I'd had enough life experience to know when to keep my mouth shut. I answered him with a smile, which was not unlike me, and said, "I don't really remember."

But really, I remembered all of it.

I remembered that I had been bored and vacant through my schoolgirl years, always waiting for something bigger.

I remembered having friends and hating them, wishing we shared more similar interests.

And I remembered feeling all of those things up until the day I met Tom. I had just taken all my NEWTs and was completely ambivalent toward the results. After all, it had already been decided that I would bide my time, attend parties, and wait to be wooed. Then I would fulfill my ever-so-exciting life calling of being the wife to some powerful Pureblood.

But I was sick of the small town and the big mansion and the rich kid parties. Sick of being stuck in a tiny bubble of safety when I wanted to go on adventures.

I shouldn't have wanted for more. But I did.

When my parents introduced us, they said he would only be staying with us a little while. He assured my sisters and me with a smile that it would be of absolutely no inconvenience to us.

But I wanted inconvenience. Just once, I wanted something that wasn't perfect, wasn't orderly, wasn't safe.

The boys I'd known in school were nothing like him. Maybe it was the age difference and maybe it was that I hadn't been attending school with him for seven years like all the other boys I knew. Maybe it was just that I saw through that charming exterior and saw a dangerous mind and a lecherous smile, and was excited by it.

But above all my teenaged memories, I remembered what it was like with Tom; waking up next to him, always getting up for breakfast and never knowing if I was hungry; my stomach twisting constantly those days with something that could have been anything from infatuation to a stomach flu.

And I remember I wanted it. For Tom was something I had longed for all my life. He was _more_.


	2. Chapter 2

I feel like there is electricity running through my skin. It skitters along my veins and zig zags around my rib cage. It heads down to my toes, then returns to my stomach to complete its acrobatic routine with a flourish and a flop. I would be impressed if it weren't for the vaguely sick feeling.

I have never been more affected my a man's throat before tonight. I am trying to eat dinner in peace but how can I when Tom is chewing so beautifully and then _swallowing_ like... God.

I can't stop thinking about it. He has been staying with us for little more than a week and I am infatuated, the way I never am. The way I'm acting isn't me. This is Cissy's territory. I am too independent. But I have been watching Tom from across empty rooms for nine days; passing him in the hallway and whispering good morning because it's polite. Staring at him across the dinner table.

He is older but he moves with such life. I can feel him everywhere, my body pulling me toward him too often throughout the day. I would bet my inheritance that Andy or Cissy had not seen him half as much as I have. Because their brains haven't been infected.

I go to the kitchen when I don't want tea because I feel him there. I search for reading material in the library when I'm in the middle of a book already. It is like a permanent _homenum revelio_ has been ingrained in my heart and mind and I search him out everywhere I go.

Tom catches me staring and fuck. I feel scared for some reason. There is no way any one person can be so terrifying and so alluring at the same time. I feel like I deserve an apology. As soon as he glances away to continue his conversation with my father, I return my gaze to him. I listen to the lilt in his voice; soft cadences meeting harsher tones, but I don't hear the words. My eyes follow the movements of his lips, his hands, his chest as it expands with breath. With life.

_Here, here, and here, _I map the places out inside myself. Heart and mind and ears. Everything is trained on him. He can have whatever he wants from me. I will freely give it.

I just feel insane. And it's brilliant.


	3. Chapter 3

This is how it has always been: Cissy; Andy; and me.

We are in the powder room. I am smoking and they are applying the finishing touches on their make-up. My sisters are beautiful.

We have always loved the same things: Lipstick and hairspray and cigarettes. Some things we have identified better with. For instance, I despise the peach coloured lipsticks but my mother won't let me wear the red. Andy is partial to hairspray and uses it in excess. Cissy loves the way the perfect shade of lipstick can bring a whole outfit together.

Even if we all partook of each of these things while in the powder room, the three of us returned to our own vices, at the end of the day.

Cissy has always been perfect. Somehow it is ingrained in her in a way it never has been for Andy and me. Maybe it is because she looks like our mother that she is so able to please her. She is all neat lines and coiffed hair and perfectly appropriate mannerisms. She will have no problem staying under mother's thumb.

Everyone says Andromeda looks like me. It makes me feel prettier than I have any right to.

But Andy is dangerous, if riled correctly. She is unflinchingly good-tempered, even kind, if left alone...

_(I am five and she is three and I have stolen her toy. I don't much want it, but I don't want her to have it either. She cries and hits me. I have a bruise for a week. She isn't allowed to go to the gala._

_I am twelve and she is ten. I have just returned from my first year of Hogwarts and I tell her she is a squib. Revenge comes in the form of a foot-shaped bruise on my shin._

_I am fourteen. She has just started bleeding and I tell all her friends. I wake up without eyebrows._

_Seventeen. She has been trying to win the affections of Evan Rosier for three months. I let him feel me up at the Christmas party. I have to hide in my room for a week while the boils heal.)_

...But I have a habit of starting fires. And she has such a habit of exploding. We are the hairspray and the cigarettes, volatile when combined. Narcissa is the lipstick, perfectly applied.

Still, Andy is the most like me. She is just as desperate to get out of here. She told me once she didn't want to be tied down to this life. That she had started dying the minute she was born.

I said I never wanted to die.


	4. Chapter 4

I am staring at Tom's mouth again. This time when he catches me looking, he doesn't look away. It is either a smirk or a trick of the light. It sets my heart to ricochet mode and it ends up somewhere in my left armpit.

He catches me in the hallway after dinner. I have just smoked my night-time cigarette and I am wearing my silk nightclothes. He was up late talking business with my father. I wasn't sure which kind of business because the only job Tom speaks of is Borgin and Burkes and he hasn't been there for a few years, at least. He is humming something, some song that was on the wizard radio hours ago.

I start to wish Tom a good night and he stops me. The hallway is narrow and we are closer than is proper.

"Ms. Black, I wondered if I might-"

"Bellatrix is fine," I interrupt him. I know it is impolite to interrupt a gentleman, but I have been around daddy's friends long enough to know a gentleman when I see one. Tom was not gentle. He did not appear it, but he was fierce and full of rage. I wondered how I was the only one to see it.

"Bellatrix," he began, "I wondered if I might have the pleasure of accompanying you into town tomorrow."

"You may have whichever pleasure you wish of me, Tom." He looked startled but not because he was embarrassed. He was like some of the boys in school, who were used to getting their way with the village girls, but when it came to the Pureblood girls, they were all crossed knees and propriety. The majority of us waited until marriage. I waited until Tom.

I kissed him there in the hallway. I still recall his calloused fingers traveling up my sides under my nightclothes; his thumb brushing the bottom of my left breast. I remember that he didn't apologize and that I didn't ask him to.

I opened the nearest door, an unused guest bedroom and led him in. My footsteps were heavy and in the back of my mind, I could hear my mother's voice telling me to tread lightly. _A lady must always walk as if she has hollow bones._ I pushed the thought out of my mind and looked up at Tom. The look in his eyes that night was better than being given the moon and the stars. My hollow bones were now filled to the brim with fire as he slid into me.


	5. Chapter 5

Sorry it took ages. Like, I haven't posted in a year. I'm so sorry. To make up for it, here's a super porny chapter?

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, yada yada

No one ever knew the true nature of our relationship. There were whisperings, years later, within the circle, about the time he had spent with our family. The time before he disappeared, before he came back with glory and power in spades. They simply thought we were friends. They thought I was deranged because of all the time I spent in Azkaban for him.

None of it was true. If I was deranged at all, it's because I was forced to live out my life with Rodolphus, a stupid man who didn't know how to fuck or to feel, and all the while I sat across tables from the new Tom – across circles in graveyards and dark alleys – having to remember.

I had to stand next to my husband, a man I didn't love, while staring across a room at the only man I had ever loved, though he didn't know how to. I had to see his face and remember the night he came into my bedroom while I was reading and everyone else was asleep.

He took the book from my hands and set it down beside me. Then he kissed me, soft. It was a new game of his, never kissing the same way, to see how long it would take before I broke down this time. He lay down on top of me, sneaking his hand between my thighs. I wasn't wearing anything underneath my babydoll and my legs spread willingly. I did everything willingly for Tom.

His kisses were slow and just as teasing as his touch. I responded willingly, this time forcing myself not to grab him and devour the moment, instead resting my arms carefully around his neck. The pace he set was so deliciously slow I thought I would burst open before the night was through; just explode into a constellation of lights. I wanted to stay there forever, with Tom rubbing slow circles and kissing me devilishly sweet.

That night he used only his fingers. He left before I could return the favour.

The next night he found me in the kitchen. He propped me up on the counter and used only his mouth. And again he left before I could say or do anything.

I had to stand across from him all the time, remembering the night after that one, when I finally tracked him down in the library, and without warning or delay went to my knees in front of him. As he tried to find something to hold on to, he pulled a book from the shelf and it landed across from me on the floor.

I had to pretend I was just another follower of the Dark Lord, when he had once sunk to his knees next to me on that library floor and turned me around, and fucked me senselessly while I stared at that fallen book and screamed his name.

We were playing a dangerous game. At any moment, any of the times, someone could have walked in; we could have been a little too loud. But we kept playing. I always kept playing his games, even after he was done playing with me.


End file.
